Seeking a spiritual lift, our reporter enrolled in
classes at the Kabbalah Centre, only to discover himself
involved with a group under fire from Kabbalah experts,
cult-watchers and disgruntled ex-members.

“Suppose this hidden wisdom
revealed all the secrets of the universe, all the solutions to
your problems ... ” — from Power of Kabbalah by Rabbi
Yehuda Berg

I was in one of my periodic funks
when I heard about the Kabbalah Centre awhile ago. Since I’d
long been seeking miracles in the secular world for my
assorted complaints, ranging from back pain to low-grade
malaise, I thought it was finally time for a spiritual
makeover, looking to God as perhaps the ultimate personal
trainer. After my flings with self-help courses, alternative
healers and herbal cures, why not return to my Jewish roots
and seek answers in the 2,000-year-old wisdom of Jewish
mysticism, the Kabbalah? Besides, Madonna thought it was cool,
too.

Madonna, along with such
celebrities as Elizabeth Taylor, Rosie O’Donnell, Sandra
Bernhard, Barbra Streisand and Jeff Goldblum, has helped give
the once arcane study of Kabbalah new cachet. But the pop
trendiness of it all troubles some local Jewish authorities:
“It’s a sad day for Judaism when an [ancient] tradition
depends on Madonna attending a class to make it acceptable for
Jews,” notes Rabbi Terry Bookman of Miami’s Temple Beth Am and
the author of The Busy Soul.

Still, for disaffected Jews like
myself who barely attended synagogue and non-Jews seeking
another exotic route to enlightenment, the Kabbalah Centre has
become probably the most popular place to go. The two centers
in South Florida — in Boca Raton and, until recently, Aventura
— are part of a network of nearly 40 assorted centers
worldwide that have drawn since 1969 a claimed 3.4 million
visitors. Whatever the truth about the group’s attendance,
there’s little question that it’s one of the fastest-growing —
and most profitable — spiritual phenomena in the
country.

The group has raked in enough to
collect high-priced real estate around the world: a $4.5
million headquarters in Tel Aviv, a $2 million headquarters in
Los Angeles and a $4 million investment in a midtown Manhattan
building. The New York branch alone has more than $20 million
in net assets, according to its 1999 IRS filing. As an
Orthodox rabbi and former insurance salesman (real name:
Feivel Gruberger), “Rav” (Rabbi) Philip Berg, 72, with his
wife Karen, and their two sons, has figured out how to harness
the power of the Kabbalah, turning the Centre into a
multimillion-dollar organization to spread the mystic word to
Jews and non-Jews alike.

Here in South Florida, the
Kabbalah centers seem to be booming. Since opening in November
1993, the centers have drawn about 18,000 people to take
courses or buy an array of books, tapes and other materials.
Last week, the Miami-Dade office moved to a new Miami Beach
headquarters on Collins Avenue and officials are securing more
land for a new building. The opening ceremonies on Jan. 17,
designed to promote a spate of new courses with such titles as
“True Prosperity” and “Health and Healing,” drew a large
turnout of more than 150 people, ranging from twentysomethings
to middle-aged baby boomers to senior citizens.

Inside a large, white,
chapel-like room decorated with framed Hebrew letters —
including the all-powerful “72 names of God” — followers and
potential recruits were told about the personal happiness that
would be available to them if they just applied the principles
and tools of the Kabbalah. These included, they would soon
discover, “scanning” the revered Zohar text in Aramaic by
looking at the letters without needing to know their meaning
and drinking bottles of allegedly curative Kabbalah™ Mountain
Spring Water blessed by the group’s founder, Rav Berg. As with
all the other centers, the new site features the slogan
“Improving People’s Lives.”

But critics of the group, I
discovered months after enrolling in courses at the Miami-Dade
office, paint a far darker picture. “They don’t practice what
they preach,” one former member says. The organization is
under fire from Kabbalah authorities, ex-members,
investigative journalists and cult-monitoring experts. These
attacks are reflected in some disturbing allegations,
appearing in everything from Israeli, Jewish and California
publications to reports by American Jewish organizations:
low-paid staffers are said to use scare tactics in
door-to-door peddling of overpriced $345 Zohars, including
threatening a few elderly couples in Boca Raton; vulnerable,
even ill, members are preyed on for exorbitant donations or
purchases of merchandise; Rav Berg has absolute authority in
the group and is seen as a godlike figure with supernatural
powers; and he in turn exploits his ill-paid, exhausted
“volunteers” with degrading, menial tasks, such as cleaning
his wife’s slippers with a toothbrush. The organization has
vigorously denied such charges.

A few South Florida families also
are charging that the group’s two local centers have used
“mind control” to exploit their college-age children to work
like “slaves” for the centers. One mother — who remains
anonymous in part because of fear of retaliation — has watched
helplessly as her son has nearly abandoned a high-achieving
college career to focus on earning more money to donate to the
center, while exhausting himself with lowly tasks for them. A
few families are concerned that some members are engaging in
coed ritual bathing — a complete perversion of the sacred
Orthodox immersion ritual at a “mikveh,” or ritual pool, which
is done separately by each sex as a purification for such
events as the Sabbath or 12 days after
menstruation.

Charges of intimidation, greed
and broken families also plague the Kabbalah organization.
Critics say the group and its supporters sometimes threaten
perceived enemies or wayward members who won’t donate money.
One critic, a Los Angeles rabbi, found a severed sheep’s head
outside his door. And one veteran ex-worker for the group,
Ruth Bronstat of Tel Aviv, even alleges that she saw Karen
Berg bring cash from the U.S. and elsewhere in suitcases;
Bronstat also observed that the Centre in Tel Aviv used a dual
set of books for accounting.

Moreover, the Centre allegedly
spurs the breakup of marriages and families when members’
involvement in the group strains their ties with their
families, even promoting adultery among members by claiming
their current spouses aren’t their “soul mates.”

“They’re the closest thing to
Scientology I’ve ever seen,” says Rabbi Bentzion Kravitz,
director of the Los Angeles division of the anti-cult Jews for
Judaism, of the Centre.

The Centre’s national spokesman,
Rabbi Yehuda Grundman, calmly dismisses all the assorted
charges as lies or distortions. “Too many people have gone
through the Centre [successfully] to neutralize the claim that
the Centre is a cult,” he says. “It’s so easy to make
slanderous remarks. For every negative story, there’s 10,000
people who are happy with what they got.”

The Centre’s lure is
indisputable. Its come-on for its beginner’s course typically
tells would-be Kabbalists: “Kabbalah means ‘to receive.’ What
we’re looking for in life is fulfillment so how come we don’t
have it? We’re missing the rules of the game of life, and
Kabbalah gives us the rules of how to receive fulfillment.”
For a mere $150 for a 10-week course, the course booklet adds,
you can find out the secrets of existence for yourself. These
include a class on “What makes miracles happen? Secret codes
to change your physical and metaphysical DNA.”

The Centre’s Miami-Dade office in
Aventura was — until it moved to Miami Beach last week — a
cheery strip-mall storefront located right next to a Subway
sandwich shop and Circuit City. Among posters of the swirling
cosmos was the evidence of how brilliantly they cater to
spiritual seekers, packaging New Age pursuits with Kabbalah in
their lecture series and on the shelves of their store,
turning the center into a one-stop shopping bazaar for
aspiring mystics. For sale were tapes on Soulmate Secrets,
Kabbalistic astrology and, for more material concerns,
Kabbalah and Business: Eight Provocative Principles for
Prosperity and Profit.

I was finally hooked by this bold
promise in their catalog: “In 10 classes, you will learn the
purpose of life, the source of all suffering and a strategy
for personal fulfillment.” At last, here was an approach to
spiritual growth for those seeking a form of instant
gratification, Kabbalah-style. You could find new meaning in
life while getting even more of the goodies life has to
offer.

Or so it seemed when I joined
roughly 30 other people to hear about the glories that awaited
us by studying Kabbalah.

When I arrived for my first
class, sweet-natured young women, some from Israel, greeted me
with big smiles. It was an unusual and slightly unsettling
sight: lots of Jews smiling. It must be a cult! I thought for
a moment, but then dismissed such doubts. My concerns were
eased somewhat by my teacher, Avi Nahmias, a portly,
good-natured Israeli recently transferred to the Kabbalah
center from Paris. (His class was just one of about 15 classes
and lectures offered by the center that semester.)

His enthusiasm was inspiring and
persuasive, despite his thick Israeli accent. He told us how
the Kabbalah gave him the answers to life’s questions, and the
program we were taking was designed by Rav Berg, the heir, Avi
claimed, to the tradition of a distinguished Kabbalist yeshiva
in Jerusalem founded in 1922.

Avi then incited our hopes by the
simple act of encouraging us to shout out everything we wanted
in life, as a dutiful new student, a middle-aged blond woman,
wrote it down on a chalkboard: “Health!” “Happiness!” “Love!”
“Money!” “Knowledge!” “More Money!” So much for selflessly
serving a higher power.

The group’s appeal seemed clear
from this class. All that we hoped for was possible for us
because, Avi told us, “Kabbalah has the knowledge, Kabbalah
has the power.” The way to tap into the power of God that the
Kabbalists call the Light is to follow a variation on the
golden rule, Avi said: “The only way to help myself is by
helping you; it’s the only system to have everything I want to
receive from this Light.” Indeed, he promised us, “What you
call a miracle is a way of life for Kabbalists.”

The center’s pop cosmology
reduced a complex, demanding tradition into an accessible
Kabbalah-for-Dummies. Most Kabbalist authorities denounce
Berg’s E-Z approach as either a distortion or
oversimplification of what the various strands of the Kabbalah
say. Still, their basic themes made sense to me and seemed, at
first glance, to promote helpful behavior and attitudes. Of
course, their basic points and practices may all be
balderdash, but it’s impossible to know if they’re any more or
less true than, say, Christianity’s belief in the virgin
birth. But what is clear, if the allegations about the group’s
misconduct are true, is that they’ve taken what could be sound
spiritual principles and used them to justify greed,
exploitation and abuse.

In keeping with the broad themes
of Kabbalah, the center taught the basic notion that the best
way to connect with God is to try to be more like God
ourselves. Reflecting a view common to a range of New Age
philosophies, Avi told us, “We have the power to create what
we want.” Among other points, the course also taught us that
if we’re to receive fulfillment — also called the Light or
energy — we need to stop our selfish, instinctive “reactive”
behavior and act in a more God-like, “proactive” way,
especially when faced with upsetting situations.

They also taught other principles
that at first seemed benign, but perhaps served as a
justification for the alleged staff exploitation and hardball
fundraising tactics by the group. But as a new student, the
pointers appeared to be an appropriate response to the
challenges we faced in life. Such difficulties were, they
claimed, generally caused by the “tikun,” or correction, our
souls needed for bad or “reactive” behavior earlier in our
life — or past lives. It was a Jewish version of karma, the
law of cause and effect, with, naturally, a little more guilt
added. Their life rules sounded ethical, but also could be
twisted to exploit followers, such as: “Giving beyond your
comfort zone generates light.” Still, Rabbi Alan Brill, Ph.D.,
an assistant professor of Jewish mysticism at the New
York-based Yeshiva University, says of their basic points: “It
sounds very good; what they’re putting out is incredibly
standard Kabbalah.”

Even so, the group’s philosophy
can be unsettling, especially their view of evil. We needed
challenges to overcome in order to “earn” the Light, Avi told
us, and the universe provided a force, an opponent, to test
us: “The Satan,” a metaphysical energy that he pronounced
Suh-tan, emphasizing the last syllable. “He controls every
negative action — the Satan is the cause, the seed level for
chaos in the universe!” It turns out that the Satan, besides
tempting us with selfish desires, also was the force behind
all the attacks that the Kabbalah Centre faced from critics,
Rav Berg argued in his latest book, Immortality. This
paranoid-style mentality was apparently muted in the early
classes that novices like myself took, but is clearly evident
in Berg’s writings and, critics and local families say, in the
stance adopted by the group with staffers and longtime
students.

“They foster a very strong ‘us
vs. them’ mentality,” notes Rabbi Michael Skobac, the
education director of the Toronto branch of Jews for Judaism,
a national organization dedicated to resisting cult and
missionary groups targeting Jews. “And they foster a sense of
dependence on them as the only purveyors of the
truth.”

As I attended more classes and
lectures, and learned more about the group, I began to wonder:
Had I somehow stumbled into a cult?

“We are certain that the Satan
has chosen Kabbalah as his battleground. He has fired up his
troops with all his energy. ... They are adopting the tactic
of discrediting us, of spreading rumors that the people
involved in the Centre are brainwashed ... ”

— Rav Philip Berg in
Immortality

Whatever Satan’s role in the
attacks on the Centre, there weren’t any overt signs of
cultish mind-control in the Florida program’s enthusiastic
students. Despite their long hours, the young center staff
didn’t seem to be obviously exhausted or exploited, either;
although most were volunteers, some of the most dedicated were
working for little more than room and board. (The national
office, though, curiously barred me from interviewing any
center workers.) The South Florida Kabbalah students who
attended classes there seemed to be well-adjusted
professionals independently pursuing their careers, while
finding meaning, community and improved lives through
Kabbalah. They also appeared to be unaware of the most serious
allegations raised against the group by the news media and
cult-watchers, although one of the students sought to reassure
me, “We’re not a cult because we’re not asked to conform.”
(These professionals are generally not exposed to the
allegedly darker side of such religious groups until they’re
drawn into a devoted inner circle, cult experts
contend.)

Maybe I should have been more
suspicious because they were so upbeat about the center, but
such fervent endorsements at first only made me feel that I
was missing out on something valuable — not that they were
victims of a Svengali-like Rav Berg.

“When I scan the Zohar or go to
Shabbat services, there’s an inner peace and feeling of
confidence that I get,” says Zev Auerbach, a 43-year-old
creative director at Zimmerman and Partners ad agency in Fort
Lauderdale. “The Kabbalah is a study of how positive energy
can benefit you physically and spiritually.” He started taking
private weekly classes there about three years ago, after his
wife got involved. While Jewish groups around the country are
complaining that the Kabbalah Centre seeks to break up spouses
who disagree about attending the centers, this couple found
new strength together. “It’s enhanced our life and gotten us
closer together. And we’ve met a whole lot of good people
through the center,” he says.

The Kabbalah program, in fact,
has a particularly powerful appeal to local Jews who had
pursued other spiritual paths or drifted away from mainstream
Judaism. That’s what happened to John Corovay, 53, a Jewish
Broward-based general contractor who visited astrologers and
psychics before turning to the Kabbalah Centre here about two
years ago. “I have no doubt an elevation in consciousness,” he
asserts, in addition to greater calmness. He was attracted to
Kabbalah classes, in part, because they involved some
astrology, plus he welcomed discovering the supernatural value
of the prayers he once took for granted. “You’re not just
reciting prayers, you’re making visual connections to myriad
assemblages of Hebrew letters that are powerfully connected to
the universe.” This view has the added advantage of permitting
non-Jews (who make up about half of the group’s students) and
secular Jews who can’t read a word of Hebrew or Aramaic to buy
expensive ancient texts and recite prayers.

Indeed, he admits, “When I first
started ‘scanning’ the Zohar, I felt like a shmegegge [Yiddish
for fool], but then I thought, ‘It can’t hurt.’ And then, I
found that along with the courses, I really got benefits.
They’re more tools that the universe has provided.” But such
tools come at a steep price: $345 for a 23-volume set of the
Zohar — available at Judaica Enterprises in North Miami Beach
for $150 — and it’s almost pure profit for the Centre, because
the printing costs often have already been subsidized.
(Spokesman Grundman, though, claims other Zohars aren’t as
comprehensive.) Fortunately, cash-strapped Zohar buffs also
can buy a tiny-print version of a Zohar section devoted to
healing for a mere $10. Presumably, it doesn’t produce the
magical effects that the recommended minimum 30 minutes a day
with the big-ticket Zohar provides.

The money students spend here on
Kabbalah courses and materials doesn’t seem to bother most of
them. Although they won’t discuss amounts, elsewhere in the
country, some loyal followers have spent up to $20,000 or more
on donations and courses, former members say. The young
workers and volunteers sometimes turn over a significant
portion of their earnings in outside jobs to the local centers
for courses and “tithing,” while the “chevras,” the most
dedicated workers, raise $5,000 or more a month in sales of
Zohars for the centers. Individual courses still average about
$15 a class, or $150, but there are successive course levels
to complete, with students encouraged to take more classes to
achieve greater growth and achieve the miracles they were
first promised. (When they don’t achieve those goals, one
former South Florida student recalls, “The rabbi said you
haven’t tried hard enough.”) There’s always more tithing,
praying, scanning, volunteering and classes they’re urged to
do, former students say. “Doubts,” they are told in more
advanced classes, “are from the Satan.”

Still, there is no hard sell put
on members in most of their public gatherings, although the
Centre also uses spiritual manipulation in its written appeals
to loyal followers, including those in Florida. One recent
note from Rav and Karen Berg claimed, “The most certain method
by which we can both retain and increase the blessings God has
bestowed upon us is to share a portion of that bounty with
others,” especially the Centre with its Kabbalah promotion
efforts.

They urged their believers, in a
variation on old-fashioned televangelist appeals, to
participate in the “cosmic circuitry of the Creator” by giving
money to the Centre. “It is an incentive program that puts
stock options to shame,” they said.

Often, though, donations are
cultivated as part of the individual mentoring relationship
between teacher and student.

“There’s an interest [in giving]
if you feel you’re getting spiritual enlightenment,” student
Corovay notes. “It’s all one to one.” (If Jews have created a
cult, as critics charge, at least the fundraising is
tasteful.) As for him, “I don’t want to count the money I
spent.”

He was, though, initially
skeptical about spending on the purportedly miraculous bottled
water the group sells by the caseload. “How come we’re being
milked for money for the water?” he wondered, but then
accepted that the money would be used to spread the message of
Kabbalah — and the water itself would also be sent to
Chernobyl to somehow heal the polluted environment.

They fervently believe in the
power of the water. Case in point: For the Hebrew month of
Tammuz, roughly corresponding to July, they held a “Rosh
Chodesh” (first of the month) lecture and meal that drew about
70 people, instructing us how to tap into the astrological
energies of the month — which happened to be the Cancer sign.
Dangling above us were bottles of Kabbalah water as
decoration. “This month, you may find yourself uniquely
vulnerable to negative influences,” we were warned by Rabbi
Shimon Sarfati, short, bearded and articulate. “The month of
Cancer is when the cancer cells start to go wild.” Worse, we
were told that our protection from cancer and other dangers
was especially weakened this month so we would need added
“tools” to help us.

After discussing the spiritual
value of sharing, etc., Shimon finally said of the water,
“This is a very powerful tool to remove disease and problems
from your life.”

No one in this happy group of
believers seemed to have any doubts. Still, for the center’s
Jews to get away with selling magic water to these
well-educated Kabbalah students, they needed to embellish
their spiel with enough references to science and spiritual
tradition to make it plausible. The Centre’s case, backed up
by pseudoscientific literature and the Rav’s book,
Immortality, claimed that the new millennium launched an era
when immortality was possible, and that the fabled Rav Berg
has learned how to restore water’s ancient longevity powers
through special Kabbalistic meditations. “He’s blessing the
water,” Shimon told the rapt audience. “The water itself has
the power to cure. This information was delivered to us to
remove cancer from our lives. The water can create
miracles!”

We were, naturally, eager to
start loading up on some of that water, but first, we were
guided through a healing meditation on the water. With eyes
closed, we each held up a cup of the elixir, as waterfall
music played softly, and Avi intoned, “We want to receive the
water to help us ... prevent cancer, confusion, chaos, all
kinds of problems, and create the protective shield we
need.”

Soon, he made a bold claim that
not even a Jim Bakker or an Oral Roberts would dare to make:
“This is immortal water.” Avi then stoked the crowd’s fervor
by asking, “Do you believe you’re immortal?”

The crowd roared back, “Yes!” and
broke into chants of “Immortality!” I suddenly felt like I had
wandered by accident into a pep rally for Heaven’s Gate
members.

There was a mania in their
response that chilled me, and my unease wasn’t helped when I
asked Avi later, “By immortality, do you mean physical
immortality or the soul’s immortality?”

He answered confidently,
“Physical immortality. People will not die anymore. That’s
what science says.”

The science for the water’s power
was highlighted by a report that supposedly showed special
before-and-after photographs of water molecules treated with
Kabbalistic blessings. It showed the water before the blessing
as a random pattern, but after the blessing, the water
molecules appeared to take a more crystalline, ordered
arrangement, resembling a leaf. “We have reversed entropy and
reversed the second law of thermodynamics,” contended Dr.
Artur Spokojny, a cardiologist who oversaw the independent lab
tests.

Decay and aging thus can be
halted with blessed water, these New-Age Kabbalists argue,
although it’s a view shared only by a fringe element in other
Kabbalistic factions. Indeed, the miracle claims disturb most
mainstream religious observers. Miami’s Rabbi Terry Bookman
observes, “I’d like to see the medical evidence, not just
anecdotal accounts. In cultlike groups, miraculous powers are
attributed to the leaders — one blessing from him can cure you
— and that stuff is pretty sick.”

He adds, “I’d hate to hear
someone is drinking the water in lieu of getting treatment.
You’re running the risk of people dying, it’s very scary
stuff.”

The organization’s staffers don’t
discourage the use of medical treatment, but they say medical
treatment doesn’t remove the emotional or spiritual causes of
illness.

Despite skepticism, the Centre
still seeks to wrap itself in the mantle of science. Even so,
when it comes to the magic water, there are less supernatural
explanations for the changes in the photos the group cites.
Dr. Katherine Baker, a microbiologist at Penn State-Harrisburg
who studies drinking water, notes, for instance, that even the
slightest change in light or the position of the container
with the water could account for the differences shown in the
photos and other tests. (“We’re sure it’s not an artifact,”
Spokojny insists, citing more high-tech studies supposedly
showing the water’s unique structure.) Baker says, “I’m very
skeptical,” although she doesn’t completely rule out the
possibility of some other mysterious factors at work. Still,
she dismisses the notion that somehow an immutable law of
physics has been proven to be reversed by these photos. “You
could get a pattern just by freezing water in your
refrigerator,” she notes. “I don’t think that means you’ve
reversed the second law of thermodynamics.”

Still, the Kabbalah Centre
continues to use scientific jargon to promote ancient
superstitions to modern-day yuppies. The Hebrew or Aramaic
letters are like bar codes that we scan, we were told, and
these letters represent the “DNA code” of the universe. “The
letters are vehicles for metaphysical energy,” Avi told one
class. “You can’t tap into the Light without using the Zohar.”
In practice, this meant students are urged to spend time
regularly skimming the words with their fingers, somehow
drawing in the energy from passages designed to help them
resolve such issues as finding soul mates and battling “dark
forces.” In talks and lectures, scanning the Zohar had been
presented as yet another way to “have no cancer,” as Avi told
us in one class, while the Zohar volumes were portrayed as a
mystical force that altered the course of an earthquake in
Iran. The Zohar itself is a dense, 13th century masterpiece in
Aramaic that explores the mysteries of creation, the cryptic
messages encoded in the Bible and the basic tenets of
Kabbalah.

The scanning of these tomes is,
Centre spokesman Grundman contends, “part of a meditative
practice. Going back 3,800 years, letters were used for
tapping into the energy of the divine.”

Cult-watchers offer more sordid
explanations for Zohar scanning. “It has its roots in Rabbi
Berg’s desire to sell books at high prices to people who can’t
read them,” says veteran cult expert and counselor Rick Ross,
who has advised the FBI on cults and offers a treasure trove
of damaging reports and articles on numerous alleged cultlike
groups, including the Kabbalah Centre, at his Web site,
www.rickross.com. Rabbi Michael Skobac, of the Toronto branch
of Jews for Judaism, also points out that the scanning
practice robs students of their own ability to master the
Zohar and Kabbalah. “It’s part of the manipulation: What
better way to keep people ignorant than to say, ‘We’ll do the
thinking for you, just scan, you don’t have to learn on your
own?’ They’re not given the ability to learn Kabbalah —
they’re being spoon-fed Berg’s distillation of the Kabbalah.”
Grundman counters by noting that advanced students can take
classes to study the Hebrew translation of the Zohar directly
and a full English version will be published soon.

Perhaps the oddest talisman the
group offers is a little red string that sells for about 25
cents in Israel and retails for as much as $26 in the Kabbalah
centers. (Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, for example, were
recently spotted wearing them following a consultation with a
Centre rabbi.) Supposedly, it offers protection from the “evil
eye” of strangers and assorted negative influences. After one
class in which Shimon warned us about how gossiping and
speaking ill of anyone — the “evil tongue,” he called it —
would come back to haunt us for eternity, I rushed out to buy
the red string. As Shimon tied the string around my left
wrist, he silently meditated over a vision of the tomb of the
matriarch Rachel where the yarns of red string are blessed. “I
sent you to Israel,” he told me when he finished, but it was
up to me to manifest its power by refraining from negative
thoughts or talk about others — no easy task for a
reporter.

All these amulets and magical
practices cheapen Kabbalah, critics say, but there is a long
folk tradition known as “practical Kabbalah” that the Kabbalah
Centre has in fact inherited — even if it dismays scholars and
rabbis who prefer Kabbalah’s more philosophical and
intellectual legacy. “You can have your cake and eat it, too,”
as one traditional Kabbalist authority, Canadian Rabbi
Emmanuel Shochet, scornfully describes the center’s
perspective. “It’s sacrilegious and blasphemous to try to
manipulate God to act for you.”

Shochet’s bitterness may stem
from the fact that he’s been sued for libel and slander by the
national organization for $4.5 million for critical comments
he made in a 1993 lecture. The still-pending lawsuit asserts
that Berg and his group were slandered by Shochet’s claims
that they were violating Jewish law by offering astrology in
counseling, scaring naive people with evil that would come to
them if they don’t donate money and making “ludicrous”
promises of physical health and wealth to those who buy their
publications. Grundman denies the charges and says the suit
was needed to “halt the slander”: “To be spiritual is not to
roll over and play dead,” he says. But by suing in a secular
court over essentially a religious dispute normally handled by
a rabbinical court, Berg, an Orthodox rabbi, and his group
violated a very firm traditional injunction against Orthodox
Jews turning to secular courts. Indeed, traditional Jewish law
notes that to do so marks the person as a “rasha” — a totally
wicked person — who “is regarded as one who reviles,
blasphemes and rebels against the Torah of Moses our
Teacher!”

That’s also a good summary of how
much of the Jewish world sees Rav Berg, the “renegade rabbi,”
as Rick Ross puts it.

“Rav Berg is not only the
messenger, but the personification of Kabbalah for our time.
His humility and self-effacing persona ... is not a
contradiction of his importance as a Kabbalist, but rather
proof of it.”

— from the introduction to
Education of a Kabbalist by Rav Philip Berg

Rav Berg’s approach to Kabbalah
has been denounced by Jewish critics and rabbinical
authorities around the world. In Israel, the country’s leading
Kabbalist, Harav Kadouri, issued a statement saying, “Whomever
is supporting Mr. Berg financially or otherwise, or any of his
affiliated organizations is endangering his soul.” It’s
unusual for rabbinical or Jewish organizations to publicly
denounce the practices of other Jews, but that’s what has
happened in Toronto, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, New York City,
Philadelphia and Los Angeles. For example, the Vaad Harabonim
of Toronto, an organization of Orthodox rabbis, issued a
statement saying the group, then known as the Centre for
Kabbalah Research, is “not approved nor endorsed by the
undersigned rabbis.” Berg has chalked up the criticisms to
sheer “jealousy” over his success and to archaic Orthodox
views, but as cultbuster Ross notes, “We haven’t gotten
complaints about any other Kabbalah group.”

On top of that, Rav Berg’s claim
to inherit the mantle of two beloved, legendary Kabbalist
rabbis has been disputed by their heirs in Israel.
Particularly open to question is the assertion emblazoned on
the group’s literature that the Centre was “established in
1922 by Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag,” and that Berg took over the
directorship of the Centre from Ashlag’s student and his
mentor, Rabbi Yehuda Brandwein, who died in 1969. But the
Kabbalist yeshiva run by Rabbi Brandwein where Berg studied,
Kol Yehuda, issued a statement noting that “our yeshiva has no
connection, in any way, shape or form, to the Kabbalah
Research Centre under the auspices of Philip Berg.”

Grundman asserts that letters
between Rav Berg and Rabbi Brandwein show Brandwein’s
intention to make Berg his successor and he blames resentment
by Brandwein’s heirs for the “venomous” attacks.

Berg’s primary connection to
Rabbi Brandwein is that he studied with him when he first
visited Israel in 1962 and married his niece, ultimately
divorcing her in 1971 to marry Karen Berg. As a successful
salesman of insurance and real estate in Brooklyn, he retained
his marketing flair when he established the first Kabbalah
Learning Centre in 1969 in Israel with the mission to spread
the Kabbalah to both Jews and non-Jews as a way to hasten the
Messiah’s arrival. His selective quotation of earlier
Kabbalists to justify teaching Kabbalah to non-Jews — when
traditionally it’s been taught to married Jewish men over 40
well-versed in Torah — is disputed by virtually all experts on
Kabbalah. Even so, by opening Kabbalah to all (Jews only make
up 3 percent of the U.S. population), he and his wife have
propelled its rapid growth since returning to the U.S. to
launch branches here in 1981. Indeed, despite their leadership
being primarily Orthodox Jews, the staffers in Florida deny
that the Kabbalah Centre is even a “Jewish organization.”
There are now nine primary centers in the U.S. and 11 in
Israel, Europe, Canada and Latin America, with nearly 20
smaller offices claimed elsewhere.

Berg has been a prolific author
and lecturer, and the clarity and simplicity of his prose —
not to mention all the talk of miracles — has helped
immeasurably in spreading the Centre’s version of Kabbalah. In
fact, it’s become the AOL of Jewish mysticism: It’s so easy to
use, no wonder it’s No. 1. This bothers other Jewish
authorities: “It does a disservice to Kabbalah to dumb it down
to a point where anyone can do it. It reduces Kabbalah to a
self-help course,” says Rabbi Skobac of Jews for
Judaism.

The group’s lure — as well as its
apparent control over the most devoted believers — also has
been enhanced by tales of Berg’s supposed supernatural powers.
Officially, Centre spokesmen have denied he’s viewed in a
godlike way or has special gifts. Still, he’s been openly
touted as blessing healing water, and even his memoir tells of
long conversations with the living spirit of his departed
mentor, Rabbi Brandwein. One awestruck follower even begged
the Rav to raise her cousin from the dead. And in a bizarre
ritual recounted in Tel Aviv magazine, former staffers say
that on the harvest holiday Sukkot, Rav Berg is surrounded by
hundreds of followers in the moonlight as he looks at their
shadows to see the state of their souls. “By the light of the
moon, the Rav sees your soul inside the shadow and finds if it
has an illness or shortcoming,” the magazine quoted one former
“chevra” (the Hebrew word for “friend”). Grundman concedes
that the ceremonies occur, but contends they’re based on
traditional Kabbalah texts: “There’s an entire science to it;
it isn’t something we came up with.”

As the all-powerful authority in
the group, Berg is apparently free to disregard some of the
tenets he teaches. For instance, while students are told to
avoid blaming others and accept responsibility for obstacles,
the Rav has a different view when he’s upset. Once, Tel Aviv
magazine reported, he slipped on the stairs at a synagogue and
blamed the lack of positive energy among his followers. “Why
isn’t there unity?” he exploded. “There are no energies,
people are not strong enough.”

There was certainly enough
positive energy greeting him recently when he and Karen came
to South Florida to visit the two centers for Sabbath services
and lectures. At one Friday Sabbath service, the chapel of the
Miami Beach center was packed by joyous Kabbalah followers
eager to worship with the Rav, men and women separated by a
white ribbon down an aisle, most dressed in white as a symbol
of the Light they hoped to attain. The Rav, wearing a white
caftan and long beard, sat with quiet authority in the front
on a raised platform as the service sometimes reached a
near-frenzied intensity. At one point, during the recitation
of the traditional Kaddish for the dead, they began shouting
Hebrew phrases from a Kabbalist prayer, pointing down to the
ground and upward, then leaping up, a symbol of their
hoped-for ascent to higher levels. I just found it
creepy.

After the service, the Rav and
Karen, sitting in high-backed black chairs, were treated to
fancier foods as the rest of us made do with mediocre buffet
fare, part of a roughly $30 fee we spent for the event. The
Bergs are usually treated, former chevras have said in
interviews with Tel Aviv magazine, as “the royal couple.” The
Rav didn’t speak that night, but his wife, the ambitious force
behind the Kabbalah throne, addressed the reverent crowd. “We
thank you for your energy,” she said and talked about their
plans to buy more land for the center. “The Light we have
extended is a door that can be opened to another soul. Use
that ability and share it with as many people as possible.”
The parents in the crowd then brought their little children
forward to huddle at the great man’s feet as he blessed them.
Soon, a woman stepped forward and kneeled before him, as he
placed his hands on her forehead, offering the
Light.

“Multitudes have returned, in one
form or another, to a deeper spirituality. ... To give just
one small example, thousands of men and women today follow the
tradition of mikveh, the ritual bath.”

— from Education of a Kabbalist
by Rav Philip Berg

To some South Florida families,
Rav Berg and his group haven’t brought much Light, but
instead, they charge, a living hell of mind-controlled young
people drifting away from their families and careers, ugly
intimidation and distorted Jewish rituals.

One claim is that some members,
in Los Angeles and elsewhere, are engaging in coed ritual
bathing.

In some cases, according to
documents I reviewed, some young followers of the Centre are
apparently boasting about having coed ritual baths together by
sneaking in at odd hours to the mikveh, the Orthodox
Jacuzzi-like pools usually reserved for traditional rituals.
Grundman asserts those documents don’t prove the couples
actually went in the pool together, but just visited the
mikveh at the same time.

More troubling, some families
here say, is the erosion of identity and family ties happening
to young people lured to work there. “It’s difficult to
explain the horror of the complete change in personality,”
says one mother of her son’s transformation in a South Florida
center. “They drill the love right out of them.”

Her son, once affectionate, has
been indoctrinated to believe that his parents are one with
The Satan, she says, and now refuses to share bread or wine
with the family. That’s because in advanced classes, he and
other followers are told that such fare supposedly absorbs
Light and energy, and they risk absorbing the energy of “evil
people” if they share them, according to a former student and
class materials I obtained.

Cooling to the Satanic agents at
home, the young Florida student has now become so enmeshed in
his new “family” that he turned over his college savings to
the group and has virtually given up his once-promising
college career. Now, his mother says, he “slaves” for them
long hours at the center, while holding down another job to
give them more money. “I hate to see my son every month give
away all his money,” she says.

Grundman asserts the Centre
doesn’t promote hostile views of parents or loved ones who are
skeptical of students’ heavy involvement.

Part of the followers’ search for
the Light comes in the zealous — if not rabid — efforts to
sell the $345 Zohars and solicit donations door-to-door, work
known as “charisha.” It’s all spurred by daily pressure and
monitoring of their sales efforts, former workers say. (One
sign of the pressure: a 1997 report listing every in-house
worker’s monthly revenues in major centers; my talented
Kabbalah II teacher, Shimon Sarfati, pulled in $128,000 in
just three months of work. Grundman, however, is doubtful
about its authenticity, although the document lists exact
dollar figures by name, for most chevras at every
center.)

But in Boca Raton and other
centers, the pressure to make sales has reportedly led to the
use of scare tactics and the preying on customers’
vulnerabilities. One elderly couple in Boca, for instance, was
“strong-armed to help pay for a new Torah and give over
$20,000,” according to Rachel Bernstein, a therapist with the
New York-based Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services
Cult Hotline and Clinic. As recounted by the couple’s son, the
center’s peddlers told them unless they donated they wouldn’t
be protected from bad luck. Another Boca couple, Bernstein was
told by their son, was approached to buy materials and attend
an introductory course, and when they declined, “they were
then told that their house could be burned.”

Grundman and other Centre
spokesmen deny such incidents and say they contradict their
philosophy. “This is not our practice,” Grundman says. “It’s
irresponsible.” But, Bernstein points out, “It’s easy to say
it’s not something they believe in, but once the problem is
brought to their attention, nothing is done about it. It’s an
unhealthy organization.”

In fact, preying on people’s
fears and weaknesses is central to the sales effort, according
to Ruth Bronstat, who helped create the original chevra
program and develop schemes to sell Zohars. She left the group
five years ago after seven years of labor, but remembers
cooking up sales pitches for the bulky, costly set. “Let’s
tell people it will bring you luck,” she recalls suggesting.
“We looked for people who are sick and had problems,” she
adds. She recites the highlights of her spiel: “It’s no
accident that I’m here today. Now is the chance to change your
life — or you can lose.” For $5,000, their chances for
momentous life changes would be greatly enhanced if they got
an inscribed Zohar with their name, she told them. Plus, “We
had an instinct for problems: If they told us, ‘My son is sick
now,’ we told them, ‘You must buy this or your son could die.’
”

She truly believed she was doing
holy work and spreading the Light, and felt that selling
Zohars would bring a miracle of sorts to her, too. “I was told
if I worked to bring a lot of Light I would find a soul mate,”
she said. For seven years, “I work heavy and bring more
Light,” she says in halting English. “I sell a lot of Zohars
but I’m single,” the 45-year-old Bronstat notes with some
bitterness.

Bronstat and other former
devotees of the Bergs are just as disillusioned by the
couple’s alleged greed and flaunting of privileges. One chevra
told Tel Aviv magazine of working all day schlepping Zohars
and finally eating a cheap pizza slice, “then I would come and
see a van being unloaded with food worth hundreds of dollars
for Karen’s three dogs.” Bronstat recalls bunking with 10
other people in a one-bedroom apartment and scraping by with
modest meals — while the Bergs were treated to caviar and
other fancy food when they visited. (Grundman discounts all
Bronstat’s claims — “She’s embittered, period” — and based in
part on his own 10-year experience at the Centre, denies
claims of the Bergs’ excesses and says the alleged degradation
of chevras “doesn’t exist. End of story.” He argues, for
instance, that they eat so well they’re even a bit
overweight.)

Bronstat also claims to have
spotted while cleaning Karen Berg’s room a large black
suitcase and a smaller valise stuffed with American dollars.
“I was shocked,” she recalls. As Bronstat tells it, Karen Berg
helped oversee a system in which a few Tel Aviv loyalists were
recruited to set up Israeli bank accounts in which funds from
America and other countries were funneled into their accounts
and in others in obscure towns throughout Israel. “She did a
lot of combinations,” she says. In addition, she asserts,
“There were two [accounting] books; they write half the count
in one book and in another they write the
donations.”

Such charges, though, haven’t led
to any criminal investigations. And Grundman contends all
Bronstat’s financial allegations are “flat-out lies,” noting,
“There’s no way that someone [Karen Berg] could be so clever
to conceal everything.” The Centre hasn’t bothered to sue
Bronstat because “it takes an enormous effort proving
slanderous remarks wrong.”

Her claims of an organization
awash in money, though, are perhaps underscored by the
internal sales report I obtained. In 1997, when the Centre was
starting to attract new attention because of celebrities such
as Madonna, door-to-door Zohar and related sales items brought
in roughly $1.3 million in six months in just three major U.S.
urban areas: Los Angeles, New York and South Florida. Los
Angeles alone pulled in $675,000 in door-to-door sales in six
months.

There’s little doubt about one
thing: The Kabbalah Centre has surely tapped into the “cosmic
circuitry” of prosperity.

“We all need to work hard to
return the world to spirituality. ... Each person must simply
be treated with love and respect.”

— from Education of a Kabbalist
by Rav Berg

If revenues from Zohar sales and
other sources have come in part because of preying on fears
and hopes, it apparently reflects a troubling undercurrent of
intimidation linked to the group. In Los Angeles, Rabbi
Bentzion Kravitz of Jews for Judaism reports he still gets
regular complaints from people who’ve been contacted by center
fundraisers: “If they didn’t give money to the Kabbalah
center, they’re told their house could be burned down and
their children [could] die.” Kravitz himself was at the
receiving end of threats when he sought to aid a Russian
immigrant woman in the mid-’90s who had turned to the local
Kabbalah center for help with pains after a miscarriage. “She
was told if she bought the Zohar and scanned it, her problems
and pain would go away. It wasn’t helping,” he says. So, he
advised her to give back the books, seek a refund and separate
herself from the center.

As a result, a few Kabbalah
center fanatics invaded the local Orthodox mikveh pool where
he was cleansing himself prior to the Sabbath and began
screaming at him, “You took this woman away from us! You
damaged her soul!” Ultimately, one of them spat on him. “I
feared for my life,” Kravitz has said, but Centre spokesmen
deny such incidents have occurred.

Perhaps the most notorious 1992
incident involved Rabbi Abraham Union, the administrator of
the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of California, who suggested
in a fax to some colleagues that they send out a copy of the
Toronto rabbinical letter criticizing the Kabbalah Centre to
all Southern California rabbis. When he arrived at work the
next day, he found a severed sheep’s head on his doorstep.
Several young men then appeared at his home that night and
asked him, in Hebrew, “Did you get our message?” He filed a
police report but detectives found no evidence of a link to
the Kabbalah Centre. Still, he never sent out the letter,
fearing for his life.

“These events being described are
fabrications of some sort,” Rabbi Grundman says. “It’s got
nothing to do with anything we stand for.”

Even loyal students can face
threats if they show signs of drifting away from the
Centre.

Robert (not his real name), a
former student so fearful of Centre retaliation he won’t even
reveal the city he lives in, recalls how his growing belief in
the value of the program was undercut by the mounting pressure
from a friendly teacher to donate $10,000. After he still
balked following a few visits to his house by the teacher, he
ran into the teacher at the center, who threatened him, “If
you don’t give money, something bad will happen in your life.”
Robert thought at the time: “Who the fuck does this guy think
he is?” Later, the teacher flatly lied about the incident to
Robert’s wife, who is still pursuing studies there.

The Centre may end up sowing
divisions between them and finding new astrologically inspired
“soul mates” for the still-loyal spouse. Critics say that’s
the Centre’s m.o. with troubled marriage partners. One former
South Florida student recalls mentioning marital troubles to a
staffer and being told, “Dump him, we’ll find you another
one.”

Cult hotline therapist Rachel
Bernstein remembers counseling a woman who had mentioned to
her husband outside one center that the place gave her the
“creeps.” “The next thing she knew,” Bernstein says, “he was
asking for her birthdate and astrological sign, and that there
was something wrong with the date they were married.” Later,
the local center steered him to a woman with a supposedly
better astrological fit, and the wife was
abandoned.

Grundman counters, “Why would we
be interested in splitting people up? Sometimes, people drift
apart, but it’s not because of Centre indoctrination. We don’t
tell people who to be with or not to be with.”

Maybe so, but the saddest cases,
according to some followers, are those still-married couples
who belong to the Centre and are apparently encouraged to try
one new “soul mate” after another to resolve their marital
troubles, with each new relationship ending in
heartbreak.

The most tragic victims of all,
though, may turn out to be those loyal chevras and other
volunteers who have genuinely sought the Light by following
the Bergs — and might have little to show for all their
devotion except fear of their power. “Once they give up a
career, they work more or less for free, they’re in there for
10 years, and they walk out with nothing but the shirt on
their back,” Rick Ross says. Another loss for the
disillusioned is their faith itself: “People have come to have
something religious, they have a bad experience and then they
think this is Kabbalah and Judaism; they’re getting a skewed
picture of what something could be in their lives. It’s a real
shame,” therapist Bernstein observes.

The hardcore devotees who now
feel such joy in devoting themselves to the Bergs’ version of
Kabbalah also may someday find, as Ruth Bronstat did, there’s
no place for them to go. She realized how little she was
valued when she asked permission to leave her post in Paris to
visit her dying mother in the hospital back in Tel Aviv and
was told, “Leave it and go sell the Zohar — that will change
the life of your mother.” When she finally returned to the Tel
Aviv center to her little room after mourning her dead mother,
Karen Berg spotted her weeping and told her, “Here, you can’t
cry. If you don’t want to work, go home.” In any case, as Ruth
Bronstat recalls, “That made me understand I didn’t have a
home.” (Grundman insists the story involving Karen Berg is a
fabrication: “That’s not the language Karen uses. She
appreciates the chevra for devoting their lives.”)

Bronstat hadn’t spoken to her
family for close to seven years, because they were, she was
told, the evil “klipots,” or shells. She wanted to earn some
more money at the center so she could take some courses in the
outside world, but ultimately, after seven years of work and
at 40 years of age, she was thrown out with three shekels in
her pocket — not even enough for bus fare.

She had never really found the
Light the Bergs promised, and, in fact, “I saw I was
blind.”